Alcatel Go Flip

The Alcatel Go Flip is an average voice phone that doesn't live up to the promise of its ambitious operating system.

The Alcatel Go Flip is an average voice phone that doesn't live up to the promise of its ambitious operating system.

Jan. 20, 2018Sascha Segan

The Alcatel Go Flip ($75 at T-Mobile; $145 at Sprint) could be the future of flip phones. It runs KaiOS, a new operating system that could easily bridge generations by bringing messaging apps common among younger people (like Whatsapp) to their flip-phone-loving older relatives. Right now, though, it's just a run-of-the-mill voice phone.

The Go Flip is available on Sprint and T-Mobile. For both carriers, it's part of a push to shift customers from 2G, which most voice phones still use, to 4G LTE, so the carriers can retire the old 2G networks in the future. (For what it's worth, both Sprint and T-Mobile intend to keep 2G alive for at least two more years.) As of this writing, it's the only low-cost feature phone those carriers sell.

Design and Call Quality

The Go Flip is a slightly squashed-looking flip phone in shiny black plastic, with a 1.44-inch color display on the front. Flip it open, and there's a slightly raised chiclet-style keyboard and a dim, 320-by-240, 2.8-inch LCD. The keys are big, nicely separated, and have a little bit of give to them. On the side, you'll find volume rockers, a dedicated camera button, and a headphone jack.

Call quality is good as long as you stick to the traditional holding-it-to-your-head mode. The earpiece is powerfully loud, if a little harsh. Voices transmitted through the mouthpiece sound super-smooth, with good noise cancellation.

But when we attached a Plantronics Voyager Focus UC headset, the Go Flip's old Bluetooth 3.0 connection struggled. Calls in the headset sounded thready, and my voice was highly compressed, at one point so squashed that an IVR had trouble telling what I was saying.

The speakerphone isn't great. The speaker itself is bottom-ported, so it faces away from you, and it isn't very loud. More importantly, speakerphone microphone transmissions on the Sprint network came through as disappointingly muddy.

Voice dialing is missing. At least you can define ringtones by caller, and use your own songs as ringtones if you like.

The Go Flip runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 processor, like other modern feature phones. The T-Mobile version has LTE bands 2/4/12, and the Sprint version has 25/26/41. I didn't have any RF problems indoors or out, and T-Mobile users will see a significant coverage advantage with this phone over one that relies primarily on 1900MHz 2G. Both models support Wi-Fi calling, on 2.4GHz networks only, and both have GSM/UMTS for international roaming. (According to Sprint, its model only roams within North America because of Sprint business policies.)

There's a Wi-Fi hotspot mode, as well as USB modem tethering. That said, the Snapdragon 210's Cat 4 modem is pretty slow, so you probably won't see speeds much above 10Mbps.

Battery life was good: We got 7 hours, 32 minutes of talk time.

Order From KaiOS

As all of the major wireless carriers switch to LTE, voice phones now need to support voice-over-LTE, which older RTOS operating systems can't do. Two competing OS approaches have grown up for the next generation of voice phones. LG, Kyocera, and others have gone with a severely crippled version of Android, with no apps and fixed functions. We've seen that approach, on and off, since the Motorola i886 in 2011. Back in 2016, I looked at whether Android was the future of feature phones.

Android-powered feature phones tend to have clean, efficient interfaces. But because each one is its own custom remix, they lack an opportunity for third-party apps and don't offer easy ways to add additional messaging services, like Skype, Whatsapp, or Facebook Messenger, which families may want to use to stay in touch.

KaiOS has more potential. Originally developed by a company called Acadine as a spinoff of the Mozilla Boot to Gecko core, it's now run by a company called Kai that has close ties to TCL, Alcatel's parent company. KaiOS is based on HTML5, which makes it easy to develop for. On Kai's site, the OS maker shows an app store with mapping, news apps, social apps, games, and a great-looking email client. The KaiOS-based Jio Phone, in India, has Facebook and mobile payment apps.

Unfortunately, none of that potential is realized on the Go Flip. Moving between icons is slower than on Android-based flips like the LG Exalt LTE. The browser, which should be awesome—it's Firefox!—doesn't support location, so you can't use maps, and it crashed when I tried to load heavy pages.

The KaiOS interface may be all HTML5, but it looks just like other old-school feature phones: a grid of big icons with commands attached to Left and Right buttons below the screen. The colors are bold, the fonts are attractive, and the icons are clear, but once again it's all quite sluggish. It's all of the overhead of HTML5 with none of the apparent flexibility or extensibility, at least on this phone.

There's a tiny glimpse of the power of KaiOS in the calendar and contact syncing systems. You can import contacts from Gmail and Outlook, and they import properly, with multiple phone numbers, pictures, and everything. The calendar will also sync with Gmail and G Suite, and show events.

Otherwise, beyond the typical messaging functions, you have e-mail and calculator apps, but no flashlight, magnifying glass, or games. Alcatel could and should push a system update to the Go Flip lineup to enable an app store and more capable apps. At the very least, simple downloadable apps like a currency calculator, tip calculator, and Snake or BrickBreaker game could make the Go Flip a lot more compelling.

Finicky Features

The Go Flip comes with 1GB of free storage, and you can also tuck a microSD card up to 32GB in there. I found the microSD slot to be a little sticky, and I had trouble getting the card out. The phone's onboard music player will play MP3, AAC, OGG, and M4A files, but not FLAC; it also supports M3U playlists. You can play music with the flip closed using wired or Bluetooth headphones, but oddly, it won't show you the song name on the exterior screen. The FM radio is a little bit of an afterthought. You can favorite stations, but it doesn't have auto-scanning or RDS station and song names.

The Go Flip's camera is simply bad. There's a 2-megapixel main camera, which records 320-by-258 video. Images look yellow or bluish, blurry or like the lens is coated in Vaseline. The video mode only gets up to a jerky 20 frames per second in good indoor light, and the screen image kept tearing when I recorded.

You can play videos stored on your microSD card, but they look grainy on the small screen.

Comparisons and Conclusions

I really wanted to like the Go Flip because KaiOS has so much potential. An easily extensible, HTML5-based feature phone OS could bridge some of the gaps between smart and feature phones, keeping up with new talk and messaging services as they arise. It's a great idea.

But the Go Flip doesn't realize the promise of KaiOS—it's just a kind of slow, fixed-function feature phone that doesn't work all that well. Sprint and T-Mobile don't offer any other low-cost feature phones, though, which sort of puts you in a bind. Sprint's Kyocera DuraXTP works much better, but it's also $270. Ouch.

Using unlocked voice phones on T-Mobile generally means relying on the carrier's 2G network, which doesn't have anywhere near the coverage of its LTE network nowadays. If you're OK with that and you want a pure, simple voice phone, look at the Snapfon ezTWO 3G. Otherwise, the superior coverage offered by the Go Flip's LTE is worth choosing it over unlocked flip and candybar-style alternatives that lack LTE and Wi-Fi calling.

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About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web show and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the BBC, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta.

Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer, having contributed to the Frommer's series of travel guides and Web sites for more than a decade. Other than his home town of New York, his favorite ... See Full Bio